The face of change

Dynamic glass façades and a soaring glass atrium make 2 Graham St. an ideal high-exposure address for media conglomerate NZME.

Impacted by the internet and the digital world, media groups today are consolidating and reinventing themselves for a brave New World. Part of this is finding premises that bring divisions together for a focused, integrated news presence.

While 2 Graham St wasn’t actually built for principal tenant New Zealand Media and Entertainment (NZME), it did provide the ideal environment in which to merge the newspaper, radio, and digital media business.

Designed by JCY Architects, with Jason Gerrand as project director, and MCS as the civil and structural engineer, the development consists of two new six-storey commercial office buildings linked by an enclosed glass atrium.  

There is also a second atrium that floods natural light into the heart of one of the buildings. In addition, there’s a connecting podium and 240 carparks in two levels of basement parking.

Besides offering around 2,26,580 sqft of office space, 2 Graham St animates the area at street level with retail along the edge of the longer building B. Further retail is on the side of the podium that steps down to Hardinge Street at the rear of the buildings.

The contemporary, mixed-use development boasts large floor plates of upto 33,368 sqft per level and the two buildings’ significant size could have resulted in a monolithic presence.

Gerrand says there are many aspects to the complex façade that helped define and yet downplay the presence of the conjoined buildings.